“EA Sports as a service rather than individual, discreet purchases” is important to us, says Moore

Peter Moore has said it’s important to EA Sports to connect its customers under one network and when you offer services such as this, the games themselves become a service as well.

Speaking in an interview with IGN at E3, Moore said EA’s goal with the games as a service business model, is to offer customers something less expensive with more content.

“Software as a service, SAAS as they call it, is the future,” he said. “Software that’s not on a floppy disk or a disc or some form of cartridge, that is the key. Once you have software as a service, games as a service becomes important as well. Having EA Sports as a service rather than individual, discreet purchases becomes important to us. How do I provide all of my portfolio and franchises to you as a service as software is usually delivered rather than hoping you go to a store and buy my game instead of the game next to it on the shelf? That is the NetFlix model. That is any online subscription model.

“Ultimately our industry has got to move towards being able to build services, and we have a unique situation at EA Sports where we’re really the only true ‘brand’ in video games. There are publishers like ourselves, Activision, and Ubisoft, you can argue they’re brands, but I’m not sure if you buy an EA game, for example, you buy a game that happens to be published by EA. Our research shows people will be an EA Sports game. EA Sports is a brand they trust, and so what we’ve got to be able to do is how do we tie that all together? That’s what I was talking about, this concept of a service, of subscription models, and of being able to go direct to consumer.

“If you’re our average guy, maybe you buy two or three games a year. That’s $180. Can I provide you with a service that’s less expensive, that provides you with more content? Those are the models that all software companies look at and we’re no different.”